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Instagram Is Now Banning Pickup Artists, Pranksters Who Use Meta Glasses (businessinsider.com) 31

Instagram is banning videos filmed with Meta smart glasses that harass strangers in public, including prank videos targeting service workers and pickup-artist clips of women who may not realize they are being recorded. "If you're posting content that is taking advantage of people and harassing them, like a lot of these pickup line kind of videos that we've heard of and seen, then we're going to take the content down," said Instagram head Adam Mosseri in response to a question on his Instagram stories last week. "We don't want people to be surreptitiously taking videos of other people and harassing them and then posting them on our platform. So we're trying to fight that every way we can." Business Insider reports: It's unclear how many videos have been removed under this new policy. Business Insider found that two large accounts of pickup artists who filmed themselves approaching women in public while wearing the glasses had been deactivated. (Both previously had more than a million followers.)

A Meta spokesperson confirmed to Business Insider that these accounts were booted for violating the policy about posting harassing content that had been filmed with the glasses. Meta did not directly respond to questions about how this new policy is being enforced or what exactly constitutes a violation.

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Instagram Is Now Banning Pickup Artists, Pranksters Who Use Meta Glasses

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  • This is the most obvious use for the glasses in the retail market. Nobody except for Gen SocialMediaNarcissist wants this.
    • PIckup artists are the most obvious use case?

      I would think it's people recording themselves doing activities who don't have a hand free to take out their phone. Maybe athletics and athletes: bikers, climbers, skiers, or really anything.

      Or people taking lazy travel videos: just walking through an interesting area.

      • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

        by Cyno01 ( 573917 )

        Folks who wanna do that have been using gopros for years, theres maybe arguments to be made about a more exact POV vs slightly above or to the side for certain things, but theres still not a whole lot of reasons to use secret spy glasses instead of a superior but more obvious gopro besides secret spy reasons.

        • by _merlin ( 160982 )

          People have been trying to be creeps with GoPros for years as well. A guy I worked with a bit over a decade ago asked his "friend" to try and fix his GoPro after he got water in it while trying to surreptitiously film women at a hotel pool.

          • A problem we have is that an entire generation of women has created, reinforced, up-voted, and profited by pushing
            debasing stereotypes of men, inventing new disparaging terms for men, complaining, and filming men in public for internet points.

            They've shown it is a model to social media climb with a few of them turning in teenage rebellion, angst and the "need to be part of something bigger than oneself" into a monetary jackpot.

            The filming for internet points via gopro or, now, glasses, is just an extension

            • by _merlin ( 160982 )

              What does that have to do with it? The guy was using his GoPro to try and surreptitiously film women in swimsuits so he could wank to the videos later. He was exemplifying those stereotypes.

        • But a pair of sunglasses is a better form factor than bolting a camera to your helmet or t-shirt. It's not revolutionary, but it is better.

      • That's a thing that has been solved by varous types of action cameras for over a decade. Try again.
      • Action cams are what people typically go with for that use case. Better quality video and audio with better runtimes for a fraction of the price, enabling folks to add them to helmets, handlebars/chest and more for multiple angles. These Meta glasses are actually worse than Google Glass and have greater cloud dependence. Maybe the only saving grace will be longer support than Google provided.
    • Re: (Score:2, Informative)

      Yes, harrassment is the only use case for these glasses.

      • There are lots of uses for the glasses.

        - Auto mechanics inspecting a vehicle - https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com] and lots more
        - Technicians of different trades recording and sending video to the home office for help from an expert technician
        - Regular inspections of buildings, construction sites, machinery, ....

        The reporting should take the extra 20 minutes to get beyond starting with "men bad" by default narrative.

        A news article about "How are smart glasses being used for bad?" should also include "How are

    • Nobody except for Gen SocialMediaNarcissist wants this.

      I think you underestimate how big that market segment is.

      • I do not, nor do I overestimate it because it's own defining characteristic makes it one of the loudest voices in the room. Nor do i think it should be catered to in ways that are obviously bad for society.
  • by BeaverCleaver ( 673164 ) on Friday July 24, 2026 @10:16PM (#66255684)

    Meta's platform for sharing pictures and videos from Meta's hardware has started blocking their own users from posting content. So Meta is admitting that their product sucks and their users are jerks? This seems like a pretty big admission.

    • Well their product evidently works very well, so well that it's enabling jerks to be a whole new level of jerk.

  • Just the ones using the spy product from their own surveillance company. Other creeps carry on with your other cameras.
  • Will there be a way for end users to identify content filmed on AssholeCam (tm), and assuming there is how does somebody complain about a clip without knowing who posted it? Is it digitally watermarked? What are the criteria for banning people? How long are they banned for? How is the ban enforced? Do complainants learn the outcome of the complaint?

    And ultimately, why is the burden on people to complain? Unless somebody explicitly says "I consent" to these fucking things, then the assumption that no conse

    • Criteria is simple... somebody either sued Meta, or the video created a public backlash.

      • by DrXym ( 126579 )
        Most likely. It'll be an opaque, impossible system to complain to, probably screened with AI and arbitrary rejections, without the ability to appeal, or see a reason, or see if the person was punished or how long.
  • They should refer these cretins directly to law enforcement instead of trying to hide the problem.

Egotist: A person of low taste, more interested in himself than in me. -- Ambrose Bierce

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